One of the most troubling things about reading Clark Williamson’s A Guest in the House of Israel is realizing that anti-Judaism isn’t just some anomalous bug of Christianity that can easily be tossed out. It’s more or less a constitutive feature of the patristic-medieval-Reformation-modern Christian consensus. As Christianity gradually emerged as a separate religion, the church defined itself, in myriad ways, as the anti-Judaism. Jews were, according to this line of thinking, “carnal,” legalistic, hypocritical, particularistic, ethnocentric, unfaithful, etc., while the church was “spiritual,” grace-full, upright, universal, faithful, etc. This stuff is all over Tertullian, Irenaeus, Athanasius, Augustine, the medievals, Luther, Calvin (although, according to Williamson, Calvin actually comes off better than nearly anyone else in the tradition on this score), the anabaptists, liberal theologians, neo-orthodox theologians, liberation theologians–pretty much everybody. It infects the church’s view of covenant, its doctrine of the authority and interpretation of scripture, its Christology, its doctrine of God, its view of the sacraments, and its approach to mission. This is why Williamson thinks that a more radical re-thinking of the church’s theology is necessary in a post-Holocaust (or post-Shoah) context than most Christians have been willing to countenance.